My Life
State law requires that prisoners younger than 17 attend school no matter how heinous their crimes, so the Chicago Board of Education runs a school for them, the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center School. The school is on the second floor–just above the courtroom, just below the jail–of the juvenile court building, which is near the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Ogden Avenue on the near west side. The jail used to be called the Arthur J. Audy Children’s Home, and many of its occupants still call it the Audy Home.
I Got a Lot Going for Me
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Dee Oglesby is 61. She has gray hair, glasses, a southern accent, and a soft, easy laugh. “I like challenges, I guess,” she says. “It wouldn’t be as much fun teaching rich kids in some suburb. I did that, you know. I taught kindergarten and second grade in Palatine.” She left that job in 1969 to move with her husband to Canada, where they ran a hunting and fishing lodge. “That didn’t work,” she says. “We went broke and had to return to Chicago. I did some substitute teaching for a while, and then I got a permanent position at the Haven School at 14th and Wabash–it’s since been torn down. That was an experience. It was in a black neighborhood, and I didn’t know anything then about race or blacks and whites. I come from a little town in North Carolina–when I was growing up, blacks and whites didn’t mingle much.
“I asked to come to the detention center. I look at the students here and think ‘They’re just like me, except we were born in different places.’ We have a caste system that they’ve been placed into, and they have no way of getting out. They’re just as smart as me. They’re just as smart as you.
–a 15-year-old
“We’ve got roughly 285 kids,” he says, “40 to 50 girls, the rest boys. We have 45 teachers. There are about 10 kids to a class. We keep it pretty orderly. I’m not scared to be here. I’ve never been threatened. I’ve had to break up fights. But we’ve got pretty good security in here, too. I know the youngsters don’t have any weapons.”
